


Developmental Beta: Of Canons Unknown to Me

by Developmental_Beta (Emmessann), zjofierose



Series: Real-Life Examples [3]
Category: Original Work, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Beta-Reading, Developmental Beta-Reading, Developmental Editing, Gen, Meta, Unknown Canon, Writing, editing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmessann/pseuds/Developmental_Beta, https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when your beta doesn't know your canon?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Developmental Beta: Of Canons Unknown to Me

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Zjofie Rose for inviting me to beta a canon I'd barely heard of and then allowing me to chat about it.
> 
> This is part of a series of essays on beta-reading fics. Many popular fandoms are mentioned briefly, and there is a detailed example from a Teen Wolf fic at the end.

Most of the time when you beta, you and your author will come from the same fandom.  Chances are, it’s what brought you together. Sharing a fandom is like sharing a high school clique. You're part of a much larger community, but because you're both band geeks or burnouts or Pink Ladies or whatever, you tend to share background knowledge and see things through a similar lens.

However, people change, canons lose their mojo, and fans tend to move on to new and different worlds. This is a turning point for many beta/writer relationships. If a beta and writer get fed up with Supernatural, and one moves on to Hannibal and the other to Sleepy Hollow, they’ll have to decide whether they’d rather stay together, or look for new partnerships in the new fandoms.

> _Doesn’t Cass_ ever _get to drive the Impala?_

There’s no right or wrong for deciding what to do. The decision will be influenced by many considerations:

  * Is your work together highly collaborative? Basically a friendship you’d hate to lose? Or is it more of a brisk once-over for fact-checking and character issues?

  * Is the beta willing to get familiar with the writer’s new fandom? How familiar? In some cases catching up with canon will be a significant undertaking.

  * Does the writer tend to immerse into one fandom for years, or bounce around? This may be the difference between seeking a beta with the same passion for the new canon, or staying with a beta who’s flexible and willing to ride along.




> _I don’t understand why Chewbacca doesn’t talk more._

I’ve worked with writers on the full spectrum of this situation, really. Some writers have moved on when I wasn’t involved in their next big fandom; it’s a natural breaking point. Some writers have asked me to familiarize myself with the new property, but only enough to get the flavor. Others have been fine with letting me take a swing at their story despite their awareness that I know nothing about anything.

> _So...Harry’s a wizard, right? Do the other kids at the boarding school know?_

How is it possible to beta without knowing canon? It’s definitely a compromise. I do think that getting feedback from someone who’s familiar with at least the highlights of canon is the best course. For betas, I’d recommend making a little effort -- although you may be surprised just how little that can be.

> _John calls Sherlock a high-functioning sociopath, but was Freud even around back then?_

On the bright side, whether you know canon or not, a story is still a story. We have certain expectations of how a story is going to work, even expectations for specific fanfic genres. (Like the romantic comedy with a high-concept plot set in a world where every character has set dialogue to “Snark”, aka about 30% of  AO3.) You don’t have to know anything about canon to judge whether a story is working along general lines.

> _Is Jamie Lannister supposed to be a good guy or a bad guy? I couldn’t tell._

What you will miss, though, is all of the shared knowledge that a canon provides, which is a major aspect of fanfic. It’s not generally The Fanfic Way to offer any context when a character first appears in a story, _(“Hagrid was a half-giant who worked as the groundskeeper and had a soft spot for dangerous creatures”)_ because readers are assumed to have that knowledge already. Similarly, fanfic sometimes relies on a reader’s ability to draw on the emotional power of key canon events without spelling them out. Many Teen Wolf fics play teenager Stiles’ overprotectiveness towards his father for comedy or pathos. It’s less common to stipulate that this role-reversal is informed by the pre-canon loss of Stiles’ mother.  In this regard, the untutored beta will miss a lot of the canon power that may be a primary engine of the story. Also, clever references to canon can seem absurd.

> _“Wait, she just ran over that girl with her_ car _? On_ purpose _?”_
> 
> _“Well, that’s how it happens on the show…”_

In my experience, beta-reading a new fandom from a dead start is a fairly advanced maneuver.  It's challenging to know what to say unless you have some confidence in your general story sensibilities. If the plot twist makes no sense, if the supposed hero needs to DIAF, can you make the call? When I first started, I’d worry that every issue I spotted might actually be justified if only I knew canon. Nowadays, even if I don’t have a context for Castiel or Tyrion Lannister, I assume they're basically people and should generally behave as such. If Cas seems overly naive to me or Tyrion seems absurdly world-weary, I'll check in with the author to be sure that’s what's intended. Overall, though, I still figure that people are people and a good story will come through.

> _Spock’s crying. The crew’s all freaked about it because…?_

I’m generally reluctant to dive headlong into a whole new canon just so I can beta a fic, and the writers I work with lately are usually able to provide me with some sort of basic rundown instead, or suggest a few key episodes to check out online. When it’s _our_ canon, we tend to think it can’t be fully appreciated unless you understand this backstory...and that unrelated incident...oh, and I have to tell you about _her_ , too! One observation I’d make is that you can actually take in a whole lot of a canon in a blink, especially in a TV or movie fandom where one well-edited Youtube vid may do the trick. Most of us can photograph and send images of a notable chapter or a specific comic issue, too. Major pieces will be missing, of course, but a small sample can be enough to get a taste, and is exponentially better than nothing.

> _Try to update Steve a little, he comes across like an old man. Oh, and Tony’s the secret villain, right? There’s no way readers will buy a hero that douchey._

When [Zjofie Rose](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose) asked me to beta a Teen Wolf Sterek fic it didn’t occur to me to look for vids until I was finished. “Wow, I completely missed that Stiles is a fetus!” I IM’d to report. “But Derek. OMG, Derek.”

Which, actually, is a caution writers may want to keep in mind when you ask a beta to sample a new fandom for you. I never tried Supernatural because it sounded too scary for me, and I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to Teen Wolf on my own. Thanks to beta-reading, those are my two most recent full-immersion fandoms. ‘Ware to writers: my sudden pressing need to catch up with six seasons at once can disrupt your access to beta-time.*

> _The Ring just makes you invisible, right? I think you’re going to need some cooler powers to make it seem worth all the fuss._

Believe it or not, there can be advantages to having a beta who’s unfamiliar with your canon, especially if you’re into feedback as a source of Writerly Growth. An unfamiliar beta won’t cut your story any slack when it comes to resting on canon laurels, as it were. If you find that your beta has a serious hate-on for your version of Remus Lupin, or Dana Scully, or John Watson (all generally seen as quite decent folks) and that wasn’t what you were going for, then it may be a sign that your story is asking canon to fill in too many blanks, and could be doing more heavy lifting itself.

I had an interesting experience when Zjofie Rose asked me to beta her Teen Wolf AU, [Holding Your Own Weight](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1168239). On the one hand, I had an advantage: the whole thing was set in a 19th-century traveling circus, so Zjo created an entirely new setting and filled in more backstory than many fics do.

The biggest issue arose when Allison Argent asked to join the circus as a sharpshooter. Stiles’ father orders everyone to hear her out as she gives a long speech about discovering that her whole family are hunters...who, she now realizes, have murdered dozens of circus people before. (Just go with it.) But now she wants to renounce all of that and they should totally let her move in.

If you’re familiar with Teen Wolf canon, you would probably expect this to be an easy sell. Allison is Scott (the Teen Wolf)'s gorgeous love interest and a significant asset in any fight. Of course the circus will let her stay.

I didn’t know any of that, however. I barely knew which girl Allison was, and in the world Zjo had depicted, it didn’t make sense that the other characters would just roll over for her. So I fired up a chat.

Ann Emmess: Hi, Zjo? Are you up perchance?

> Zjofie Rose: I am indeed. What’s up?

AE: I’m wrapping up Chapter 3 and wanted to talk over the Allison section

What is Allison’s role in the show? The real show?

> ZR: the TV show?

AE: yes

> ZR: it's complicated
> 
> She starts off as Scott’s girlfriend, and we quickly find out that she’s the daughter of the hunter family in town, and we then find out that her aunt is the one who murdered all of the werewolves except for Derek and his sister Laura.
> 
> She loves Scott, they’ve got a true love thing, but it’s really complicated by her family loyalties
> 
> She’s very independent, she’s not a wallflower or a damsel in distress, but she’s always a conflicted character.

AE: Okay, that’s helpful to know that her conflicts in the story are reflecting the show so directly.

One reason I asked is I got the feeling that her speech, etc., will work for those who already understand her, but in some ways doesn’t fit your story as its own moment.

In this story, I had barely noticed Allison before this. I didn’t really remember who she was (nor, until halfway through, who Scott was) until this scene with the speech.

So the speech builds on a lot of emotions and facts that hadn’t been apparent to me.

She’s Scott’s girlfriend, I get that. But I didn’t like her myself.

> ZR: oh really?

AE: Or dislike her. So when she starts her big confession, I’m like, hell yeah, throw her out!

> ZR: hahahahah

AE: Because, like, Deaton and Stillinski are both SO on her side with no explanation, and basically tell the rest of the group that their opinions don’t matter, and none of this made sense to me. The only characters who disagree are the ones we’re obviously supposed to discount.

When you go back to this scene, I think you can go a long, long way if you look at it with the eyes that these people have every reason to be scared and suspicious of Allison. It might be good for Stillinski and Deaton to recognize that.

> ZR: Ok, that makes sense

AE: Basically, to own Allison and her situation as your own, even if it’s taken directly from the show.

Like, seriously, real-show-Derek’s whole family got killed? That’s so sad! I had no idea that was real backstory.

> ZR: oh dude. Derek is a super tragic character.

AE: No wonder Sterek’s so popular.

> ZR: yep

  
So...there you have it. One thing I especially liked about beta-reading that particular story was that it showed the best and worst of not knowing canon. I missed a lot of quite lovely bits, like brainy Lydia treating Erica’s canon epilepsy with the best knowledge a medicine-wagon might actually have at the time. Now that I know the show, those are the kinds of canon-nuanced details I adore. But at the same time, I think that by accepting an out-of-canon beta, Zjo did use the challenge to raise her game. In the end, the Allison she wrote was her own person, who had to make choices and justify her own actions, even though she stayed true to canon to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> * Yes, this has happened, and I did not see the mesmerizing power of Dean Winchester until I was already caught. I'm so sorry!
> 
> This series is mirrored on my [Tumblr](http://developmental-beta.tumblr.com).


End file.
